


Training Day

by SegaBarrett



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: Abuse, Captivity, Gen, Jane reference, The Compound
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-25
Updated: 2020-03-25
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:26:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23306770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: Jesse teaches Todd.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 17





	Training Day

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> Disclaimer: I don't own Breaking Bad, and I make no money from this.
> 
> A/N: Super-late Blue Christmeth treat!

Jesse didn’t know how much he would miss the little things, and how he would miss them most of all.

Sometimes he could close his eyes and could almost imagine that he would spend the next day playing video games with Badger and Skinny Pete, or go to the movies with Andrea and smuggle in snacks from the dollar store like he was a teenager all over again. 

And then he would hear the sound of the cage opening, or the drip that seemed to always be going off in his ear, or, worse of all, Todd’s voice floating down to him again. 

Another day, every day, each day the same. The only things that changed were the specifics, the little things, the ways that they reminded him of what he had become every single day.

Today, it had begun when he had climbed out of the grate and Kenny had been immediately there to push him over into the dirt. He rose from the ground and prepared himself to be thrown down again – that would be what the day would be like. It was an omen.

“Oh, Jesse,” Todd said when he turned around and saw him, as if Jesse had done this of his own accord. As if Jesse was just clumsy and needed help getting around. As if Todd was looking after him out of the kindness of his heart and Jesse really ought to be grateful for all of it.

He was peppered in bruises. It was a rare day that he got through without one of them taking a swing at him.

But that was a little better – by this point, he had gotten used to getting beat up most of the time. Krazy-8 had started it, and it had just progressed since then. Jesse remembered hearing that he was something like 90% water, and now he felt as if he were 90% bruises.  
It fit.

Some days he thought of himself back in Mr. White’s class, sitting at the back and staring out the window. If he could have looked forward into the future, would he have? Would he have figured out where he had gone wrong and not made the same choices again?

Maybe the choice he should have made was to cut himself off somewhere along the line, let himself die in one of the many places where it could have happened. Maybe Mr. White hadn’t been the only one to have a “perfect moment” he could find, somewhere along the line. A place where his lifeline trickled out.

Jesse’s brain ran over and over itself, over and over again, repeating phrases that only seemed to vaguely connect as he tried to keep it busy. It was hard to find new things to focus on here – and he had thought he was bored before.

“Come on, Jesse. We might run behind schedule otherwise, and you know none of us want that,” Todd was explaining, somewhere above him, like he was trapped in a dome.

“Yeah,” Jesse said, and his voice sounded very far away, with that slight kind of crackle to it. He could remember playing walkie-talkies with Badger back in high school. He wondered if Todd ever did that kind of stuff, or if he was hanging people off of meat-hooks by the age of eight or what. He scrambled up the ladder and squinted as he looked off in the distance, at the horizon. He had never appreciated that, either, the way that it looked. He wondered if his parents were looking at it right now; if Brock was. 

That made him feel far too lonely, so he shut off the thought. But that was the only reason…

“Jesse, come on. Your head is in the clouds today. We can’t have that. We need to keep you focus.”

Jesse laughed a dry laugh and curled his fingers in his hand. They hurt, now, all the time, ever since he had bashed his ring finger into the ladder by accident, and they didn’t quite roll all the way over, which would have made things difficult if he had felt the need to fist-bump Todd somewhere along the line. 

He didn’t know exactly how he got to the lab, but he opened his eyes and there he was. He must have been dozing off – silly kid, he heard Mike’s voice say with affection in his mind, silly sleepy kid – and Jesse jerked upright as quickly as he could and stared at Todd.

“Well?” Todd asked, gesturing around it, the vast place. Mr. White would go crazy for this, dingy as it was compared to the superlab. Jesse spent a lot of time keeping it clean – if he couldn’t keep his home clean, he could at least keep his workplace clean.

That, in turn, would keep Brock alive.

“Well, what, Todd?”

“Well, you’re going to show me how to cook, right?”

Jesse looked at him, wondering whether some celestial being regularly replaced Todd with new and dumber versions, or if something was just eating away at his brain.

“I thought you didn’t want to know how to cook. That’s why I’m here.” Jesse was vaguely aware that he sounded like his parents’ housekeeper, Esmeralda, when he and Jake had tried to infringe on her territory. 

Though Esmeralda certainly would not have been called upon to show a complete idiot how to cook meth. 

“I need to learn how to cook,” Todd reiterated, “I need Lydia to see that I am… capable.”

 _Well,_ Jesse thought to himself, _you’re not_. Or maybe that wasn’t quite right. Todd certainly seemed to be capable of anything.

“I mean… sure,” Jesse said. “I’d be glad to teach you.”

He tried to stave off the flash of memory that went through him then, of Mr. White standing before him. Of the way that they had chatted in the RV while waiting for the cook to be done. Sometimes Jesse had just yammered on about anything, and Mr. White usually had some kind of opinion about whatever it was, even if it was only to inform Jesse that it was a stupid topic in the first place.

Mr. White was gone now, and maybe whoever Jesse had wanted him to be had never been who Jesse had hoped for in the first place. Maybe he had been – what was it called? – a glamour, a projection, somebody that Jesse wanted or needed.

And then it had all melted away before his eyes, because regardless of what Jesse wanted or needed, maybe he didn’t deserve anything at all but this.

He began to walk around the lab, wondering what he should be saying. He remembered trying to teach Badger, the way that the other man, boy really back then, had been distracted and refusing to listen. The way Jesse had felt frustrated but oddly fond at the same time. 

Things had changed. He wondered if he would ever see Badger’s face again. He had taken them for granted, his friends. 

“Jesse, I need you to explain it to me, not just do it,” Todd said. “I can’t follow if you’re going to move so fast.”

Jesse let out a sigh and reached up to flip a switch.

“You need to start by turning this heat on,” he explained, as slowly as he could. He wondered if this was how Mr. White had felt sometimes when he had tried to explain something to Jesse. He remembered Mr. White’s long stories, the ones that he had slagged off but he had been strangely transfixed by. What if he told Todd some kind of story to help him to understand this?

But all the stories that came through his mind were memories, and it wasn’t safe to get caught back up in any of those.

“And then you move to here, that’s, uh, the next step.” Jesse promised himself that if he ever got out of this, he was never going to have anything to do with meth again in his entire life. 

But that seemed about as likely as an angel shooting down from Heaven right now.

He pictured it happening, an angel with black hair and white wings, floating down and flicking Todd off to the side in a single gesture. Taking him back out to where he would be safe, forever. 

“What’s the last step, then?” 

Jesse, in the moment, felt oddly emboldened by the image.

“The last step is, DBAA,” he replied, and he shuffled past Todd’s confused look with a smirk. That would last him another few minutes, and maybe that was all he needed at a time. Maybe if he kept those few minutes… He could survive.


End file.
